1619 Project Themes

1619 Project Themes

Slavery’s Sweet Tooth

The story of slavery is one built upon creating and maintaining an addition to sugar. Although American slave plantations are inextricably linked to cotton, it was actually an entirely different crop that created the successful slave trade market in the so-called New World. Sugar had certainly existed before the arrival of Columbus, but it was so expensive to produce as to make it truly a choice for only the elite. The opening of the Americas changed everything about the processing of food that changed only occurred as a direct result of the economics of slave labor.

Banks Really are Evil

The only people who really seem to like banks are bankers. The poor hate banks because they take advantage of them and won’t lend them money until they can prove they don’t need it. The rich hate them because they provide too much a paper trail to successful hide their wealth. Turns out there is another very good reason to hate banks: they have instrumental and organic participants in the systemic subjugation of blacks. Banks in the north were essential and complicit partners in the economic system that propagated the use of slave labor in the south. Following the abolition of slavery, banks became essential and complicit partners in denying loans to blacks which fostered segregated communities as well an untold losses to the entire country as a result of business ideas never getting past the point of conception. The link between racial discrimination and the banking industry is one of the lesser-known monumentally ugly little dark secrets of American history.

The History of Nothing

The history of slavery in the Americas is long and tortuous and deadly. The remnants of slave ownership by half the country and a bloody war to end are still capable of being turned into major political issues today. The irony is that technically it has been a long history over nothing. Or, more precisely, a long history fought over something which does not actually exist. Simply put: there is no such thing—scientifically speaking—as race. The existence of any physiological differences between what have been identified as “difference races” boils down to just one single thing: skin color.

Other than that, the very idea of racial purity, racial superiority, racial inferiority or—especially—those born to be a “slave race” is pure myth. Racial differences simply do not exist except as human-imposed social distinctions. This theme is explored directly in one article which serves to debunk the idea while revealing how even medical students still cling to the debunked assumptions, but it pervades throughout the entirety of the text both by the purpose inclusion of the word “race” and purpose exclusion of it, depending upon context.

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